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"on," that television is contemporary culture's version of the eternal flame. Of course, this is one way in which television can be realized, and video art has been interested in exploring other constructions which are far less metaphysical in orientation. In this, Dr. Videovich shares something in common with a certain Dr. Jacques Lacan who at one time consented to lecture the French people on television about Lacanian psychoanalysis. "The aberration," Lacan remarked, "consists in this idea of speaking so as to be understood by idiots." The aberration, he insisted, occurred when one assumed that communication ought to be democratic and that a medium like television can be used to establish a homogeneous collective "ego" which is always "on" and which can always be found in the same place at the same time. To accept television as an ego-bound apparatus, Lacan was saying, was to entirely forguet about the unconscious -- about all those mental phenomena and their physical manifestations which are excommunicated from television by being kept "off the air." But what kind of "subject" results from such impairment? Only idiots: people with half a mind. To speak on the air, then, is to accept an entirely differentiated space defined in terms of the "on" and the "off" which violates the possibility of a subject who has all of his or her mental faculties. 

But to cure television, both Dr. Lacan and Dr. Videovich teach us, we have to be prepared to explore the "on" in terms of the "off." This is a serious undertaking, though Lacan and Davidovich have used considerable irony and humor in moving towards it. The undertaking is serious in that only by willfully going outside the commercialized frame or framework of television can one begin to interrogate the medium in ways that go beyond mere critique and cultural trend watching. Only in this way does one broach something like alternative television.